Harlem Hit & Run

by Angela Dews

  Next, I called Attorney Robinson.

  “I hate to ask, but the Journal’s money is stuck in the bank. Can you front me a piece of the payroll until Tuesday? We deposited a good little sum from Veteran’s Day ads yesterday. But now it’s stuck at First. I was counting on it. I’ve alerted some of my vendors. But there are the staff checks.”

  “Of course. Would a thousand dollars, do it?”

  “Ummm. I was thinking more like five thousand. Some of them agreed to wait until next week when this mess is resolved. This is something to tide over a few of them.”

  “You don’t have to impress me. If I remember correctly, you aren’t paying any Lear jet money over there.”

  “But it’s the long weekend.”

  “You’re going to take almost all the cash I have on hand.”

  “If this is a hassle, I can gather together some cash from other sources. I was just trying to avoid putting all my business in the street.”

  “For five, I’m going to have to charge loan shark interest.”

  “I don’t know anything about loan shark interest. How much interest are we talking about?”

  “I’m joking. No interest if you get it back on Tuesday. Tuesday? I thought you were leaving this weekend.”

  “We’re putting out a special edition about the bank. And we had to put off the reading of the will until Monday after we get the paper out. I’ll move the money from my bank in L.A. when the banks open Tuesday after the holiday. Or, maybe, hopefully, what’s left in our accounts at First.”

  “I’ll give you the money tonight at the wake. Do you have that kind of time?”

  “Tonight will be fine.”

  I left the house wearing my dark glasses and bought some Better Crust pies, which I left at the Miller’s. Then I walked up the hill to Benta’s Funeral Home where the clan had gathered to pay their respects.

  Aretha was singing “Precious Lord” over the sound system.

  I made a mental note to have Adrianne assign an article on the state of the funeral business.

  As I walked through the room, I was reminded of the bebop and swing we piped in for Daddy’s going home at Gary’s church. I could almost hear it. My soul was stirred and I stopped to feel it, standing in one place for a minute, until I sensed someone trying to get around me.

  Our Congressman touched my shoulder and paused before he passed. “Miss Washington. It’s so good to see you back home. I love your movies. Gives Harlem the best kind of public relations—action with heart.”

  “Thank you,” I said. And I must say I was surprised. He’s good.

  But he was already making his way to the next cluster of constituents as he passed through the room and finally stopped at the small group surrounding our bank president who was information central—the man with the world on his beautifully tailored shoulders.

  I postponed going over to interview them and instead showed my home training by making myself walk down to the front.

  Ceel looked weird—all fixed up to look like she was asleep, except gray and stiff and stuffed and surrounded by flowers. I turned away and spoke to the family who sat in the row facing her, accepting our sympathy. Mrs. Miller had been drugged, I think. She smiled a little smile to greet each of the people—are they called guests?—who stopped to give her their condolences. But the little smile frequently slipped, and a woman in white bent down to her.

  She asked me to take off my glasses and her comments about my injured face distracted us a little.

  Mr. Bell was sitting next to her. “Now we know what she was trying to tell us about the bank,” he said.

  “You always think there will be time to do the things and say the things,” her mother said. “I often worried she’d have to take care of me in 20 years.”

  Mr. Bell got up and walked with me to one of the row of chairs in the back.

  “I’m so sorry,” I told him.

  “I know. And I’m sorry about last night. Bobby must be desperate.”

  “Did you take the money?” I said without any of the preliminaries I had rehearsed.

  To his credit, he didn’t ask What money?

  “You and Ceel were smart little girls. I was on your side when Elizabeth and Charles were deciding whether to let you have your hole in the wall.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Safe for now. Elizabeth does not need to know about this.”

  “Cecelia was stealing bank money?”

  He recoiled. “I would not say stealing. Not exactly. But there are people who will not be satisfied until they get it back. You do not need to put yourself in that kind of harm’s way.”

  C H A P T E R • 35

  * * *

  Some of the conversation stopped when Gary walked in.

  He nodded to the Congressman and the bank president and made his way from the back, lingering, slowing down, speaking or nodding to the other mourners who had gathered to bury their friend, and the curious who had come so they could say they were there and so as not to miss anything.

  When he finally arrived at the front, he was able to do what I couldn’t do and knelt in front of the casket and spent some time looking at what they’d done to Ceel.

  Mrs. Miller stood up and she and Gary held each other. When they separated, Gary walked back toward us, taking the time to touch people along the way, to lay hands on them who needed it, sharing the grief.

  When he got to us, I asked, “Can we talk about the bank?” It was probably rude. But I didn’t know how much time I had.

  He took a few breaths and I caught something on his face as he performed a little smile. I know acting and that wasn’t bad. The stripe in his bow tie coordinated with the flush on his face.

  He said, “Your name came up at the meeting about the bank. Did Adrianne tell you?”

  “We haven’t talked yet.”

  “The president said this week has been more difficult because of your interference.”

  Mister Bell moved between us. “If you had been honest with us about what’s going on at the bank, we’d probably not be in this shape,” he said.

  “In fact, I have a fiduciary responsibility to NOT report back what happens at Independence National Bank board meetings.”

  “You don’t understand that you get your legitimacy from us, not the other way around,” Mister Bell said.

  “You’re hopelessly stuck in the sixties,” Gary said. Then he said to me, “Also, by the way, you were mentioned again for publishing the bid list of 61 banks. First was offered for sale to those banks across the country.”

  “Some other bank is buying the bank?” I asked.

  “Actually, no. Nobody would buy it.”

  “Is the six million dollars to purchase the assets of First coming in?”

  “The money is coming in.”

  “Then the bank will stay open?”

  “Unless some political decision is made. This bank is critical to this community. There’s no reason to let it fold.”

  “I can think of some reasons,” Mister Bell said. “Try racism and vindictiveness and pure down meanness. It’s been my experience when crackers get to make selections, they select us out.”

  “Does THEY change, depending on the circumstance?” I asked. “Or is there a cadre of little men called THEY who are out to get us, like the Wizard of Oz, standing in the background, manipulating things in the ongoing plots against us?”

  “Both,” Mister Bell said. “The Wizard of racism is busy. We yell at him a little, win a little, and then we go do something else until we get mad again.”

  “Well, we’re mad again now. Let’s see if it makes a difference this time,” Gary said, and he went to join the group around the bank president and the congressman.

  Mister Bell pointed to the congressman. “And it’s a way to punish him.”

  “Look at him. Is this what the civil rights movement got us?” I said. “Is another black congressman really supposed to do it for us?”

  “We need him to do
what he does.”

  “And what is that?”

  “He brings home the bacon. He’s now near the front of the line to get us our share of whatever they’re giving away in D.C.”

  “But whatever they’re giving away is not enough of what we need and he hasn’t changed that.” I had a mouth full of comeback; I had made this point before. “We don’t even see him unless there’s an election and many of his constituents don’t even eat swine. If he’s so good, why does Harlem look like it does?”

  “He deals with an even stronger strain of racism than we do,” Mister Bell said. “Don’t underestimate him. Things are changing. I think it will look sudden. But the groundwork is being laid right now.”

  Attorney Robinson handed me a leather clutch. “Here’s your cash. I expect it back on Tuesday.”

  I motioned to Adrianne and gave her the payroll. Then I nodded toward the president’s group who were deep in conversation. “I need to join them over there while they’re willing to talk,” I told her.

  “The president is not going to talk to you,” Adrianne said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “But he is going to say something quotable. How could he not?”

  Mister Bell said, “Just remember, he had a hell of a job trying to find his footing in the quicksand he found at the bank. And I doubt he ever planned to get old and grey at our colored bank.”

  “Good quote. Can I quote you?”

  “Of course. I’m on the record now that the secrets have all been told.”

  “Not all. We’re going to publish a rich special edition Tuesday.”

  Adrianne gave me a thumb’s up.

  Mister Bell went back down to the front of the room to join Mrs. Miller in front of Cecelia. Gary said some beautiful words in a broken voice. Someone I didn’t know sang “Amazing Grace.”

  And Adrianne was wrong, the bank president gave me a good quote: “Now you see what we are up against. This is a strong but battered community under siege. We need to work as one community with one mission.”

  C H A P T E R • 36

  * * *

  The funeral on Saturday morning felt intimate to be so full of folks. Reverend Doctor William Garrison in white vestments put on a memorable performance from his oak pulpit, handed down from his father, in front of the backdrop of oiled wood, stained glass and draped velvet. He preached with just the right mix of gratitude for a good sister now gone and certainty of her redemption in the beyond. The sentiments were buoyed by the voices of the Resurrection Chorus, who had been called out to sing on a Saturday.

  Cecelia would have approved and I was glad when it was over. He ended with a Rumi poem he said she loved: But listen to me. For one moment, quit being sad. Hear blessings, dropping their blossoms, around you.”

  I’m not sure how much more of it I could have stood. I moved to the back of the crowd filling the front of his church where I could watch the mourners file out. The crowd included Adrianne, Karl and Samantha from the newspaper.

  And when we got outside, I stood next to Adrianne on the sidewalk, while the official mourners including what must have been out-of-town family climbed into two limousines behind a hearse full of Cecelia in her rosewood coffin under an abundance of floral arrangements. Behind them, the procession of cars waited. I got a chance to hold hands with sister friends and share about this and that we remembered about being girls together.

  Viola was kicking her black with hot pink opera gloves and a Kentucky Derby hat with the veil of feather mesh covering her face. She left in her own black car.

  Gary was among the last to climb in before the sad parade headed to some little upstate town to send Cecelia home at the graveside ceremony.

  “Why aren’t you going to the burial?” Adrianne asked me. “You are really family. And I thought Buddhists have a place for death.”

  “I have paid my respects as best I can. But I have something else I must do.”

  When the space was empty, I walked from the church down the hill. I was glad to be wearing my lace Miss Kitty boots rather than heels. They allowed me to swing through the park and cross St. Nicholas and Eighth Avenues, to join the living along the wide boulevard of Seventh.

  When I found a working phone booth, I called the Reverend’s community development office and got a message machine instead of any staff who might be there on a Saturday.

  Harlem Village was in a storefront between a barbershop and a restaurant—both open at lunchtime. All the activity caused me to rethink my plan. The front office was visible through the big window and it was empty. When I walked around the corner, I discovered the back doors of all three businesses were accessible from an alley. The restaurant door was open and the smells were complex and meaty. As I fingered through a couple of the keys on Cecelia’s heavy key ring, I heard pots and pans and running water and some yelling through the screen, in French.

  I tried some keys at Gary’s back door, and found the two that worked. Then I stood inside for a moment waiting for the alarm to sound. When it didn’t, I moved quickly through the dark back storage room and into Gary’s inner office behind the public room with the big window. Back there, it was kind of a mess of leftover Styrofoam cups and yellow legal pads. Every one of the file drawers I checked was locked.

  But some of what would go back inside the drawers formed a cluster of clutter on the desk and tottering piles on chairs, and it looked like they might give up some secrets.

  With all those movie scripts in mind, I went over and locked the door to the front office and began to take notes about what I was seeing, being careful to put things back where I found them.

  I discovered several folders tagged Harlem Journal and closed my notebook and turned on Gary’s copier and started making copies. Looking over the top of the machine, I saw two duffel bags dumped in the corner. Both turned out to be full of money in small bills wrapped in rubber bands in denominations from singles to fifties. I thought it was unfortunate because if they were the small dollars from Bingo or the tithing baskets it seemed like they should be treated with more respect. I was estimating amounts when I heard a woman’s voice I recognized outside at the street door speaking to someone passing by.

  I turned off the copy machine, put the money back in the bags and the bags against the wall and the folders back on the desk. I rolled my copies and stashed them in my tote as I was walking through to the back door. I looked both ways before I slipped out and locked the door behind me and went down the alley and turned around the corner.

  As I often did, I superimposed on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard sepia images of the days when pretty women and fancy men dressed up for the kick of strolling on Harlem’s boulevards.

  Until, suddenly, the time was now and the images were danger because a man in a sharp suit with a bandage on his face was walking in the distance toward Gary’s front door, and I moved easy and slow into the doorway of a bodega and hated the rush of heat in my face at the sight of him. And when he reached the office door, Bobby Bop turned and shot his finger at me.

  C H A P T E R • 37

  * * *

  I walked over to Harlem Hospital and waited in Obsidian’s empty room. At the mirror over the sink, I repositioned my mother’s funeral hat, which I’d finally grown up enough to wear. When I had adjusted it at the top of the bandage on my nose, the veil covered my discolored eye.

  I found a plastic water pitcher and put it on the table with red roses and ribbons of ivy in it—what I had been able to buy and pilfer on my way over. I made them messy so they wouldn’t look like the stiff formations surrounding Cecelia.

  Obsidian came back into the room wearing his street clothes. “Why is it only okay to give a man flowers when he’s all busted up?” he asked.

  “I’ll remember to send you flowers when you’re better.”

  “I’ll be taking them home when I leave today.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “I just need rest. You can’t rest in a hospital.�
��

  He got close. “Girl, come here. Let me see. Turn. Turn the other way. Take that net off.”

  I blushed warm. “It’s a veil. It’s my mom’s.”

  “But how did you let it happen? Even if he had a gun, he had to get close enough for you to block him.”

  “I saw it too late and only dropped a little. Otherwise, he probably would have broken my nose.”

  “You say it isn’t broken? So, you were lucky this time. And there will be no next time.”

  It was hard not to tell him I got a jab into Bobby with the throwing star. But, fine as he is, he’s still the police.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get to teach your guys to meditate Friday after they closed the bank. I’d like to do it when I come back,” I said.

  “We can do it tomorrow. Same routine. You come between shifts. I like that it will flow organically.”

  “Organic isn’t the word I would use. Slipshod, accidental, not serious. This isn’t something to throw at them. I want to be intentional about it.”

  “Next time. This time I want you to land on your feet like we do. Take them with you where you go. Your recent adventures will give you some credibility with them. Word is you’re all over town being Lt. Summer Knight.”

  “No. I’ve been all over town being a reporter. I can’t walk down the street without running into a story.”

  “You were arrested. You had a gun at your throat. You found a dead body. You were punched out. That’s not walking down the street.”

  “I’m trying to figure out how the pieces fit together. For instance, you know it was Heavy who killed Cecelia. Somebody paid him to scare her. She wasn’t supposed to die.”

  “If you had told me before, we could have pulled him in and he would still be alive.”

  “I didn’t know it before. And you’ve been out of commission. And this session tomorrow still sounds like a bad plan.”

  “Sometimes plans can get in the way. It’s not like you have to practice, do you?”

  “Yes. I practice all the time. What I do is called a practice.”